Have you ever spotted red flags in your friend's potential mate?

Yep, a friend is going through a breakup now after 7 years of on again, off again relational conflicts. Red flags from the beginning.

Red Flag #1 Guy was still married in a 14 yr. marriage, 20 year relationship but on the verge of filing for divorce. Still living in the family house when they met.
Read: Not yet divorced and on the rebound

Red Flag #2 Went straight from the family home to living with my friend within the first 2–3 months of them seeing each other. Zero alone time, zero independence from the marriage.

Red Flag # 3 Extreme daily texting and phone calls, like 20+ a day, WTF…take some space, screams needy and insecure and lost in fantasy land. Gah!

Red Flag # 4 Poor communicator, prone to passive aggressive behavior, either happy and easy going or over reactive and angry.

I told her my concerns in the very beginning about him being on the rebound and that things were moving too fast but, she went ahead with it anyway.
People have to go their own way and I have no interest in relationship coaching for anyone. Yes, we are still friends but I have a hard time listening to her talk about the way things ended, at 50 something years of age I have little sympathy for people that still have relationship drama. So-not-interested-at-all.

Oh yes. My daughter. And I tried to warn her. But she wouldn’t listen. It ended badly. He was 34, still lived at home. He was going to school. I asked what he was going to do after graduation he said move on to his masters and on and on. Basically he was going to be a professional college student while living at home.
She finally realized how damn lazy he was. He just sat around playing video games and eating, unless he was at school. She had to go through a lot of hurt before she got to the end of her rope.
That was 3 years ago. He’s still at home, still going to school, I think.

I am horrible at judging which relationships will work and which won’t. The three much older siblings married when I was in my teens. If I had bet on each of them, I would have been wrong in all three cases.

What I learned is that how a marriage plays out is none of my business unless one or both ask for help.

We’ve all seen it. The friend reduced to a doormat. The men being walked on are either in denial or will confess to “I can’t help myself”. The women too sometimes cop to helplessness but frquently come back with some nonsense like “our love will change him”.

I had to tell a friend I thought she was being catfished. She was really hurt, but I was right.

Yeah, she was Chinese & very patriotic, red flags all over her apartment.

One of my friends was dating a guy who had a female housemate. My friend thought it was OK, because the housemate was about 15 years older than her “boyfriend.” I thought something was fishy from the get go. I met the guy a couple of times and the whole living arrangement with the housemate didn’t seem right, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. After my friend and this guy had been dating for several months, he wrote her a letter telling her it would be better if they were just friends and that his housemate meant a lot more to him than he thought and he didn’t want to hurt her, blah, blah, blah.

Basically, the guy was two-timing my friend. The housemate was his live in girlfriend, even despite their age difference (he was about 23 and she was about 40). My friend lived in another city, about 100 miles away, so she hardly ever saw him, although they talked on the phone quite often, and she did see him often enough to believe that she was actually his girlfriend.

When she got the letter, she told me that she was confused and wanted me to hear it and see if I could figure out what he was talking about. I told her that this supposed housemate was actually his live-in girlfriend. He spelled it out pretty plainly, but was fairly pleasant in his delivery and didn’t bad mouth my friend. But my friend just couldn’t believe that he was breaking up with her, or that the other woman was the actual girlfriend.

She started treating me rudely after that. She would contradict everything I said, and eventually we had to go our separate ways, because she was no longer nice to me. This was a classic example of killing the messenger. It was such a shame, because we were really good friends before this happened. I haven’t seen her in 20 years.